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Viking Age
The '''Viking Age' lasted from about 840 AD until about 978 AD, which also marks the end of the Early Middle Ages (476-978 AD). It began with the intensification of Scandinavian Viking activities from 840 AD, after the sporadic early raiding that began with Lindisfarne in 793 AD. It then ended with the reign of King Ethelred the Unready of England, which would set in motion the events that led to the Norman conquest of England. On 8 June 793, the Vikings exploded onto the historical record with their raid on the island monastery of Lindisfarne in north-eastern England. There is nothing very unusual in history about a barbarian peoples erupting from their homelands to devastate a weak but relatively rich society, but a few factors made the Vikings uniquely terrifying. Firstly as pagans, they recognised no special sanctity in Christian churches and monasteries, appearing out of "the frozen north" like something out of a nightmare, and showing no mercy. Secondly they were masters of the sea, with their characteristic longships taking them far and wide, and up rivers far inland; since none of the Western realms were confident sailors, raiders could easily outrun pursuit. The third factor that made the Vikings different from other raiders was their ability not just to settle lands but to leave behind lasting communities, based around a well-established tradition of assembly politics known as the Thing. At the same time as the Viking were falling time and time again on coast and river valleys of the west, another group of pagan marauders played a similar role in central Europe. The Magyars established themselves on the Hungarian grasslands, and raided west into Germany and south into Italy with their superb mounted-archers. These incursions had a profound impact on the cultures they interacted with; and far from entirely negative. Some of them responded to the threat by drawing together. Anglo-Saxon England is a good example, where only one of the kingdoms could successfully stand up to the wave of Viking attacks and settlement. This was Wessex and it gave England its first national hero, Alfred the Great. In 871 Alfred inflicted the first decisive defeat on a Danish army at Edington, and his descendants went on to consolidate all of England under a single king; it has remained in political unity ever since. Another example is Scotland, where the Celtic peoples were drawn together by constant Viking pressure into a kingdom under the House of Alpin. Others responded to the threat by fracturing, with France being the classical example, where royal authority almost completely collapsed. The great nobles were able to draw more and more power into a dozen or so feudal territories, because they could offer protection against Viking hit-and-run tactics, more effectively than the sluggish royal armies. Unable to expel the Vikings, in 911 King Charles III conceded lands to them in what was later Normandy; the Normans would establish one of the most powerful feudal states of Western Europe. Still others were a mix of these two responses. In Ireland, the Vikings founded a number of settlements, the most significant in the long-term being Dublin. Although Ireland was almost drawn together under Brian Boru who broke Viking power at the Battle of Clontarf (1014), he failed to establish a stable dynasty and the country fragmented again. Another example is Germany, where the great dukes recognised the need for a strong leader against Viking and Magyar raiders. One of these, Otto the Great, inflicted a defeat on the Magyars that ended their threat for ever, and went on to forge a vast realm covering much of central Europe into the Holy Roman Empire. It was a remarkable achievement and undoubtedly the most powerful realm in Europe of the 10th and 11th century, but the paradox of a monarch elected by great nobles proved fragile in the long term. Trade with the Byzantine and Muslim world rather than plunder was the main reason that the Vikings penetrated deep into Eastern Europe via the Dvina, Dnieper and Volga rivers from the 9th-century. There they intermingled with the Eastern Slavs to form the sprawling realm of Kievan Rus, the cultural origins of Russia. It was heavily influenced by the Byzantine Empire, which at the time was enjoying a spectacular Golden Age under the dynasty established by Emperor Basil I. The very zenith of Byzantine power came under Basil II, who conquered Bulgaria, establishing the Danube once again as a stable and secure northern frontier. Meanwhile in the east, Byznatines was now the ones on the offensive, the armies of the Prophet retreating as the Muslim world entered a period of decline and regional powers. Perhaps the most spectacular achievement of the Vikings was their colonisation of remote islands. Settlement in Iceland and Greenland placed them in an ideal position for further exploration; historians no longer dispute the evidence that the Vikings reached North America, over five-hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Once the traumas of their raids had passed, what the Viking left behind everywhere was a more developed commercial culture and a vast trading network connecting parts of the world that had previously had little or no connection. Gradually the story of pagan incursions became the story of the Christianisation of northern and eastern Europe, and establishment of stable kingdoms: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, the Slavs, and Russia all accepted either Roman or Orthodox Christianity by the end of the 10th-century or shortly afterwards. History The Vikings On 8 June 793, the monks on the island monastery of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumbria in England, were unpleasantly surprised by the arrival of dragon-headed longships, disgorging pagan marauders bearing wicked axes and ruin covers swords. Sparing neither the old nor infirm, they plundered whatever looked valuable and left the bodies of the monks trampled "like dung in the streets" as Alcuin of York later wrote, a prominent figure in Charlemagne's court. This was not the first encounter with the Scandinavian Vikings: they had probably been using the North Sea commercial routes for decades to trade in amber or animal fur. Four years before Lindisfarne, three Viking ships had beached in Wessex where an official was killed, though this may have been a trading expedition which went wrong. An attack on one of the most famous monastic communities in the British Isles shook all of Christiandom to its core, and is traditionally used to mark the beginning of the Viking Age '(793-1066). The popular view of Vikings is heavily conditioned by accounts written by terrified monks who were their first victims. The ''Norse Sagas, do bear-out the fact that they were more than partial to a bit of sacking and skull-crushing, but the portrait of these fascinating Scandinavians is a much more complex one; none of Sagas were written down before 12th-century, centuries after the Viking Age, predominantly in Iceland from long oral tradition. The Vikings were not a race; the word means “''pirate''” in Old Norse. Most came from settlements around the coast of the areas now known as Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Their common ground was that they came from a foreign land, and were not “civilised” in the local understanding of the word. The Viking Age was simply the last and most dramatic period in the long story of folk-movements from Scandinavia; this may have been the original homeland of the Goths, Burgundians, and Lombards. Scandinavians again began to move outwards from the 8th century onwards, for reasons which are by no means clear, but are possibly rooted in over-population and land-hunger. Since early Classical Antiquity, the coastlines had been dotted with fishing and farming communities, in a region with a very short growing season. When the world-climate was favourable, they could enjoy population growth, that the agricultural capacity of the land could not sustain. Invariably it was the young men who would coalesce into warbands and seek opportunities elsewhere. As the Sagas make clear, others were motivated to leave by Internal feuding and the exiling of a communities bad-seeds. Finally, Scandinavia had a cult of violent personal valour that was even stronger than medieval Europe; a man's social worth was defined by his skill as a warrior. There is nothing very unusual in history about a barbarian peoples erupting from their homelands to devastate a weak but relatively rich society; the same phenomena has already been seen in the late Roman Empire and the Muslim conquests. A few factor made the Vikings uniquely terrifying. Firstly, as pagans, they saw no special sanctity in Christian churches and monasteries, just a conveniently provided poorly defended concentrations of precious metals, wealth, and food. Some historians speculate that the Vikings were retaliating for Christianity's encroachment into pagan lands, especially Charlemagne's conquest and forced conversion of Saxony from 772. Worshiping Odin who inspired berserker madness, these hulking warriors, hardened by their harsh northern existence, clothed in the skins of wolves or bears, and showing no mercy, appeared out of "the frozen north" like something out of a nightmare; alas the impractical horned helmets are a modern myth promulgated by 19th-century theatre. The second factor was the Viking's mastery of the sea and rivers. At home these Scandinavians lived in small independent communities around the coast, where the mountainous terrain and fjords made the sea the easiest way of communication between them. Originally invented for trading, the Viking would negotiate the seas in their superbly streamlined longships, equipped with oars along almost the entire length of the boat, and a rectangular single-mast sail. These were wide enough to be stable on the open ocean, with a shallow enough draft to sail up rivers as little as one meter deep far inland, and light enough to be carried overland. This advantage cannot be overstates. None of the Western realms were confident sailors; the Visigothic Kingdom in Spain had probably been the last to seriously put to sea. In a single day, the Vikings could raid a monasteries, check-out another monasteries for later, and move on before local forces could be mustered. If an army was encountered, they could easily outrun them and look for easier targets. The Vikings weren't especially capable in siegecraft, yet would capture many well-fortified cities through surprise attacks and clever deceits. The third factor that made the Vikings different from other raiders was their ability to construct governments. They were not a literate peoples in terms of producing a literary legacy, at least not during the Viking Age, but they did use runes in commerce and worship. But assemblies of all the free men of a community were a very well-established tradition. At the Thing, ''the community would gather to discuss matters of justice, to amend laws, and to assess the response to any new situation. They would thrust out across the water for four centuries, not just to settle lands but to leave behind lasting communities which in the end stretched from Greenland to Kiev; Iceland still advertises itself today with some accuracy as the oldest democratic parliament in the world. The Vikings of popular imagination thus differ considerably from the complex historical reality. Not all sought the same things. The Norwegians who struck out to the Scottish islands, Iceland, and the far west were searching for land to settle, grow crops and raise animals. The Swedes who penetrated Russia were much busier with trading for goods. The Danes did most of the plundering and piracy the Vikings are remembered for; extortion was another equally effective way of getting rich. But all these themes of the Scandinavian migrations wove in and out of one another, and no branch had a monopoly of any one of them. Invariably they began with opportunistic raiding, and their subsequent behaviour depended on the cultures they encountered: in Iceland where they were no people, they settled; and the Byzantines and Muslims were powerful so they predominantly traded. It was in the wealthy but weak British Isles and France where the Vikings truly earned their reputation. Yet their impact everywhere was far from entirely negative. Once the traumas of murder, rape, enslavement and destruction of holy sites passed, they left behind a more developed commercial culture and a vast trading network connecting parts of the world that had previously had little or no connection. Vikings in the British Isles The Viking raid on the holy island of Lindisfarne in 793 was a story repeated time and again in other monasteries that dotted the coastline of the British Isles. They were not yet rich by the standards of continental monasticism, but with sufficient wealth to attract hit-and-run raids. Within two years of Lindisfarne, raids are recorded on its sister monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria, its mother-house of Iona in Scotland, and Rathlin in Ireland. By the 830s, most of the monasteries were relocating to safer territory away from the coast, and the pattern of the Vikings began to change: raiding parties became larger; inland settlements along waterways were targeted; and encampments were established on islands to remain throughout the winter. Celtic Ireland was the focus of much of the early Viking attention. It was a patchwork of perhaps a hundred petty-kingdoms, and few allowed the arrival of the Vikings to distract them from their own ongoing feuds. In a land that had never been conquered by the Romans, roads were all but unknown, so monasteries and towns were invariably located on rivers. And Irish monasteries were relatively rich, as they were often used by local rulers as rudimentary banks. By the late 830s, the Vikings had several well-fortified permanent stockades in strategic locations around the Irish coast. One was founded on the River Liffey in 841 and soon turned into a thriving trading-post; from these small beginnings grew Ireland's capital of Dublin. They also captured or founded settlements at Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Wexford, and gradually settled down as just another type of petty-kingdom among many. The Vikings refocused their energies on 'Anglo-Saxon England from the 840s onwards. Canterbury was successfully attacked in 842. In 850, Vikings overwintered for the first time in England, and the next summer raided London and Canterbury again. Then things dramatically escalated in 865, when a Viking army of unprecedented size arrived on the east coast of England, equipped for conquest rather than quick booty; the Great Heathen Army. It is said to have been led by the sons of the semi-legendary Ragnar Lodbrok, to wreak revenge against the king of Northumbria who had supposedly executed Ragnar by casting him into a pit full of snakes. They landed in East Anglia, wintered there, and then headed north over the River Humber into Northumbria. At the time Northumbria was in the midst of a civil war. Before long the Vikings had killed both rival kings, and captured the Northumbrian capital of York, the ancient Roman city of Eboracum. For the next 90-years, it would be the centre of the Danish realm in England known as Danelaw '''(866-954). In 869, Ivar's portion of the army headed south, where he conquered East Anglia, captuing and killing its king. In 871, Vikings were reinforced by a new host from Scandinavia, the Great Summer Army under Bagsecg. Only one Anglo-Saxon kingdom seemed capable of containing the Vikings. This was Wessex, and it was to give England its first national hero, '''Alfred the Great (871-899). When he was born, it must have seemed unlikely that Alfred would ever be king, for he had three older brothers. He may have been destined for a scholars life, for he had a well-travelled early life, making two journeys to Rome and visiting the French court with his father. Each of Alfred's brothers reigned in turn, but each died in their early twenties, until Alfred was became the king of Wessex in April 871. He would proved a brilliant warrior-king and a wise ruler; he is the only monarch in English history to earn the epithet "the Great", apart from the Scandinavian king Cnut the Great (d. 1035). Nevertheless, Alfred's early reign was a struggled for survival. A roaming army of Vikings under Guthrum had been plaguing southern England for a decade. According to tradition stubborn Wesex resistance and the first significant English victory at the Battle of Ashdown (January 871) eventually persuaded the Vikings to withdraw. In truth, Ashdown was one of many minor skirmishes, most of them hard fought defeats, and Alfred almost certainly bribed the VIkings to withdraw, a precursor of the Danegeld of later less fated rulers. This merely shifted the problem to Mercia, which had lost the eastern half of it's territory to the Danelaw by 877. Nevertheless, for five years Wessex was left in peace, and Alfred used the time effectively to implement a new system of national defence. It was based around a network of fortified strongholds at strategic points throughout the kingdom known as Burghs, continually manned by a local militias levied from the surrounding Shire; ''many of the boundaries Alfred established would last until changes in 1974. Some of these ''Burghs ''were twin towns straddling a river and connected by a fortified bridge, thus blocking the passage of Viking ships; an innovation the French had been using for a generation with some success. These strongholds would later have unforeseen benefits; market towns gradually grew around them, leading to a revival of urbanisation in England. Alfred also established the beginnings of an English fleet, and by 875 could boast a modest naval victory against seven Danish ships. From 876, the Vikings were regularly breaking the peace treaty, and perhaps came to appreciate that the greatest barrier to conquering Wessex was the king himself. In the winter of 878, they launched a surprise attack on the royal hunting lodge of Chippenham, which Alfred barely escaped with his life into the nearby swamp. There is a famous legend that the king was sheltered by a peasant woman who, unaware of his identity, left him to watch some baking for her; preoccupied with the problems of his realm, he let the cakes burn and was roundly scolded upon her return. This was the low-water mark for the Anglo-Saxon cause, the nearest that the Vikings ever came to conquering the whole of England. But within a few months Alfred had regrouped his forces, and launched a surprise counter-offensive, winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Edington (May 878). Pursuing the retreating Vikings to their encampment, he then exacted a peace agreement. The Treaty of Wedmore (878) effectively formalised the status quo, the mutual co-existence of Alfred's domain in south-western half of England and Viking Danelaw of the north-east. Perhaps more significantly, Guthrum, the Danish ruler of East Anglia, agreed to be baptised a Christian, both an early step towards the conversion of Scandinavia and a sign that the Vikings might be divided from one another. The next time a Viking warband raided England in 885, the Danes of East Anglia were just as motivated to defend their new homeland as the Anglo-Saxons. Alfred used the raid as a pretext to seize London from the Danelaw the next year, a crucial bridging point on the River Thames which flowed right into the heart of Wessex. For the rest of his reign, Alfred was able to focus on restoring the material and cultural well-being of his realm: he improved his kingdom's legal system, coinage, and trade; encouraged young nobles to be literate; translated into English vernacular key works of Latin that the king deemed "''most necessary for all men to know"; and commissioned an Anglo-Saxon account of English history, based on various sources notably those of the Venerable Bede. Although he would never adopt the title for himself, Alfred the Great is general considered the first King of England. Alfred's successors continued to drive back the Viking frontiers. His son Edward (889-924) won a crushing victory against a large-scale Viking incursion at the Battle of Tettenhall (August 910), and by the end of his reign had wrestled East Anglia, Essex and eastern Mercia away from the Danelaw, with each advance secured by fortified strongholds on Alfred’s model. The Danes in fact welcomed incorporation into of England in the most part, with civilisation and Christianity having done their slow work; people settled on the land wanted law and order, and protection from roving warbands. In 927, Alfred’s grandson Athelstan (924-939) conquered Northumbria and York, thus becoming the first king to have direct rule of all England. The unification however was not yet certain. Athelstan's successors repeatedly lost and regained control of Northumbria, until Eric Bloodaxe, the last Viking ruler of Northumbria, was expelled in 954. Edgar (959-975), who ruled the same expanse as Athelstan, consolidated the kingdom during his long stable reign, and it has remained in political unity ever since. It was only when ability failed in Alfred’s line under Ethelred the Unready (978-1013) that the Anglo-Saxon monarchy came to grief and a new Viking offensive took place. His reign also established the complex family links between the Anglo-Saxons and Normans that would ultimately end in the Norman conquest of England. Just as England was coming of age, at almost exactly the same time a new kingdom was forming in Celtic Scotland. in the early 9th-century, there were at least four distinctive ethnic groups in the northern-most part of the British Isles: the Picts in the north and east, the Gaelic speaking Scots in the west, while the south was contested between Celtic Britons and Anglo-Saxons. Like the rest of the British Isle, Scotland was raided repeatedly by the Vikings. In 839, a large Viking fleet invaded via the River Tay and River Earn, and reached into the heart of the Pictish kingdom. There they defeated and killed the king of the Picts, along with much of Pictish aristocracy in battle. The sophisticated kingdom, which had been stable for more than 100 years, fell into chaos. According to tradition, Scotland's first national hero, Kenneth MacAlpin (d. 858), stepped into the power vacuum, and led a united force of Scots and Picts to drive the Vikings out of Scotland; he was then accepted as the first king of the unified Kingdom of Alba, the future Kingdom of Scotland '(889-1707). A nice heroic story but sadly a myth. Modern historians reveal a more complicated and gradual process of unification. Kenneth was a Pictish noble, presumably with ties to previous kings, who became king of the Picts after the Vikings finally move-on, presumably when there was no more plunder to be had. With Pictland left devastated, it came under intense pressure from its neighbours, and eventually the throne was usurped by a Gaelic Scots noble. Two of Kenneth's grandsons, Donald and Constantine, fled Scotland and grew-up in exile in the north of Ireland. In 889, they returned and seized-back the throne of the Picts, with Donald II Alpin (889-900) and then his cousin Constantine II Alpin (900–943) becoming king; two kings of Pictish descent who had grown-up steeped in the Gaelic way of life, language, and religious tradition. Gradually Pictish ways fell out of favour, and Gaelic culture prevailed throughout the united Kingdom of Alba, especially during the long stable reign of Constantine. He introduced an important new ceremony, being crowned in the royal city of Scone upon the sacred ''Stone of Destiny, a simple block of sandstone whose origin has sadly been lost to the mists of time. It would form the basis for all future coronation of Scottish monarchs. The young kingdom's survival was touch-and-go from the outset. In 934, king Athelstan of England invaded Scotland for uncertain reasons, probably a border dispute since there was no clearly defined border between the two kingdoms. Constantine never engaged the large Anglo-Saxon force, instead withdrawing to the virtually impregnable fortress of Dunnottar, where he negotiated a withdrawal on acknowledging Æthelstan as overlordship of Scotland. Dissatisfied with this arrangement, Constantine built an alliance with Viking king Olaf of Dublin, and invaded England in turn. The two sides clashed at the Battle of Brunanburh (937), about which little is known except that it was an English victory and it was known in Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, Irish, and Norse sources simply as "the great battle" for decades afterwards. Even the location of the battle has been the subject of lively debate. Brunanburh seems to have been a pyrrhic victory for Æthelstan, preserving the unity of both England and Scotland, destined to be each others most persistent foes. The legacy of the Viking Age would not end for Scotland until the mid-13th-century. The Scandinavians had settled the islands around the coast as the Kingdom of the Isles (c. 840-1266): the Orkneys, Shetlands, Hebrides, and the islands of the Firth of Clyde, as well as the Isle of Man. The islands mostly became part of Scotland, following the Treaty of Perth (1266). Key to the birth of nationhood in England and Scotland was the establishment of a stable dynasty; the House of Wessex (871-1013) and House of Alpin (889-1034). During the 9th and 10th centuries, frequent Viking raids on 'Celtic Wales '''forced the patchwork of petty-kingdoms to cooperate, but attempts at political unity proved only partially successful and impermanent. Rhodri Mawr (d. 878), the king of Gwynedd, won a notable victory against the Viking in 856, and was widely accepted as king of almost the entire region by the end of his reign. But according to Welsh custom his realms were divided between his sons upon his death. Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (d. 1063) was the only ruler to be able to unite all of Wales under his rule. The Vikings did not colonised Wales heavily, though evidence of some settlement in the south remains in place names such as Swansea. [[Inheritors of the Roman Empire#British Isles|'Celtic Ireland]] claimed a long tradition of a national kingdom dating all the way back to the 2nd-century; a High Kings, who sat at Tara in Meath, who ruled over a hierarchy of petty-kingdoms under the provincial overkings of Munster, Leinster, Connacht, Ulster, and Meath. Most modern historians believe the concept of a High King is no older than the 8th-century, and earlier claims were constructed to justify the current status of provincial kings, by projecting their houses back into the remote past. In reality, with a population of fewer than half-a-million people, Ireland had over 150 greater or lessor kingdoms, constantly at war with one another, and allegiance to a High King was given when it suited and withdrawn just as quickly. By the 10th-century, Dublin and other Viking strongholds around the coast simply took their place among the shifting alliances and struggles for power. As power was being consolidated across the sea in England and Scotland, such developments could hardly have escaped the attention of an ambitious Irish king. Brian Boru '(d. 1014) was the chieftain of a kingdom on the River Shannon, that had grown in power under his father and elder brother to be the most powerful in Munster in the south-west. Within two years of becoming king in 976, Brian had defeated his last rivals in Munster, Viking Limerick and Cashel, and been proclaimed overking of the province. He demanded tributes of all kinds from his vassal, especially the most precious commodity of the age, cattle; Brian Boru means "''Brian of the cattle tributes". With a might army, he set about trying to control the whole island of Ireland. By 997, he had force Leinster in the south-east into submission, and reached an agreement with the Uí Néill whereby they recognised their respective halves of the country; the Uí Néill in the north and Brian in the south. But this peace was short-lived. Three years later, Brian resumed his attack on the Uí Néill home province of Meath, and forced them to surrender the title of High King in 1002. For ten years, Brian was the undisputed king of Ireland. He seems to have sought to establish a new form of kingship in Ireland, modeled on the English example; simply one king who had power over a unitary state. But no sooner had all of the regional rulers in Ireland acknowledged Brian's authority, than it was lost again. In 1012, Leinster and Viking Dublin rose in a rebellion that culminated in the Battle of Clontarf (April 1014) outside the walls of Dublin. The battle lasted from sunrise to sunset, and in the end the rebel forces were utterly routed; the provincial king of Leinster and the Viking king of Dublin were both slain. Brian Boru didn't live to enjoy the fruits of his victory. It is said that some fleeing enemies founded him in his tent after the battle and killed him; his eldest son had already died in the battle. Without Brian, Munster descended into civil war between his younger sons, and the provincial kings reasserted their independence; there would be no all-powerful High King of Ireland. The Battle of Clontarf later took on a greater role in the popular imagination, with Brian Boru uniting the native Christian Irish to free the land from pagan Viking occupation. A nice story but utter nonsense. The Vikings had been a lessor power long before Clontarf; twelve Viking earls had died at the Battle of Brunanburh (937), many of them from Ireland. Viking Ireland certainly dwindled after Clontarf, with Dublin formally incorporated into Leinster in 1052, and left few traces, except introducing red hair and freckles into the Irish gene pool. Meanwhile if anything, Brian's example led to even greater anarchy over the title of High King, which was almost always "High Kings with opposition" in the parlance of the Irish annals; one scholar wrote how competing kings had turned the island into a "trembling sod". This remained the case until a new group of invaders of Viking descent arrived on the Irish coast in 1169, the fateful conquest of the Anglo-Normans. Vikings in France The first recorded Viking raid in France occurred during the reign of Charlemagne (d. 814) in 799, with an attack on the island monastery of Noirmoutier, near the estuary of the Loire River. More systematic raiding began in the 830s, with the Vikings alternating their activities between both sides of the Channel. The ongoing civil wars between the sons of Louis the Pious left the country wealth but weak: big raids took place in Antwerp, Utrecht, and Noirmoutier in 836; they entered the mouth of the Seine and sacked Rouen in 841; and burned Nantes on the River Loire in 842. The early culmination of these attacks came in the '''Siege of Paris (845). In March, a fleet of 120 Viking ships with more than 5,000 men entered the Seine, supposedly led by the semi-legendary chieftain Ragnar Lodbrok. On their way up the Seine, Ragnar's forces raided Rouen again, and defeated a small Frankish army sent against them; they hanged 111 prisoners on an island in the river to honour Odin and to incite terror in the remaining Frankish forces. When the Vikings reached Paris at the end of the month, they entered the city and plundered it. King Charles the Bald (840–877) could not assemble any effective defence against them, and the Vikings withdrew only after being paid a ransom of 5,600 lbs of silver and gold. By 851, the Vikings were over-wintering in the lower Seine valley to extend their raiding season, rowing to Paris three more times in the 860s, and leaving each time only when sufficiently bribed. This not only bankrupted the treasury and convinced the Vikings that the Franks were weak, but further aggravated the already grave internal problems of the French kings. The population grew increasing resistant to handing over their valuables to royal tax collectors, and put their trust in local fief-lords who could offer protection against Viking hit-and-run tactics, more effectively than the sluggish royal armies. Although the authority of the Carolingian kings gradually collapsed, the French did eventually devise a method of stymieing the Vikings. This was with fortified bridges, that prevented their longships from passing without fighting. In 864, two were commission in Paris, one on each side of the Île de la Cité. In another sign of declining royal power, this was not an initiative of the king, but a local one, ordered by Count Robert the Strong of Paris (d. 866). Their effectiveness was displayed when the Vikings again attacked Paris in 885, with a fleet of some 300 longboats and 30,000 men; the Siege of Paris (885-886). This occured when Robert's son Odo was Count of Paris. He refused their demands for tribute, despite being able to assemble only a few of hundred soldiers to defend the city, and the Vikings settled in for a potracted siege. For almost a year, the Viking repeatedly attempted to assault the city but each time were repulsed. As time passed, the Viking numbers dwindled with many leaving Paris to pillage easier targets upriver, and the last stragglers were eventually driven-off. The French throne had been effectively vacant since 884, with Charles the Fat (876-888) ruling both West and East Francia. When Charles died in 888, the French nobility elected Odo I Robertian (888-898) the first non-Carolingian king of France. Throughout the next century the Carolingian and Robertian lines would vie for the French throne, with support for one or other depending on where the great nobles considered their best interests, and further undermining the fragile French political structures. By the reign of Charles III Carolingian (893-929), the Vikings had for decades been settled in the lower Seine valley, in what would later be known as Normandy. The new settlers frequently quarreled among themselves until a viking name Rollo (d. 927), who had already won a reputation as a great leader in Scotland and Ireland, emerged as the outstanding personality among them. He was said to be of such enormous size that no horses could accommodate him, so he had to go everywhere on foot, earning him the nickname Rollo the Walker. In 911, Rollo made another wild attempt on Paris. When this again failed, he besieged the smaller city of Chartres. King Charles was able to lift the siege but not drive-off the Vikings completely, so with no more gold to offer in tribute, he made Rollo an astonishing offer. In what became known as the Treaty of St. Clair-sur-Epte (911), Charles officially granted Rollo feudal rights over the city of Rouen and the surrounding territory. In exchange, Rollo pledged vassalage to the French king, agreed to be baptised a Christian along with his entire army, and promised to guard the River Seine from further Viking attacks. True to his word, Viking raids on French soil did gradually subside from this point on. No doubt King Charles believed that his grant of land to the Vikings was a temporary measure that could be taken back later, but in Rollo he had unwittingly found a brilliant adversary. Rollo instantly recognised what he had; a premier stretch of northern France possessed of some of the finest farmland in the country, criss-crossed with rivers full of fish, and rich in forests and game for the hunting. To survive in his new home meant abandoning most of his Viking traditions, assimilating with and winning the loyalty of his French subjects; he himself married the daughter of a French noble and encouraged his men to find French wives too. Within a generations, the Normans, as they became known, had taken to the French language, feudal social structure, administrative and legal systems, customs, and style of warfare; Viking armies always fought on foot, but the Normans would ride into their battles mounted. One final change took a little longer to sink-in; the conversion to Christianity. Rollo himself hedged his bets, having 100 prisoners sacrificed to Odin on his death. The descendants of Rollo and their French wives faced an uncertain future, surrounded by predatory neighbours and the French crown always looking for an excuse to reclaim its lost territory. Yet they would not only survive but thrive, becoming one of the most powerful feudal states of Western Europe. By the time the Carolingian Dynasty finally ended in France with the death of Louis V Carolingian (986–987), the pillaging of Vikings had given-way to the feudal political battles of great nobles and their knights. Although there was a surviving the Carolingian claimant, the nobles instead elected a member of the Robertian faction to the throne, Hugh Capet (987-996). In truth, Hugh and his immediate successors were hardly more than crowned lords, whose real authority extended little beyond the Paris basin. France was divided into a dozen or so territorial units ruled by magnates of varying standings and independence. The foremost among them were the dukes and counts of Flanders, Anjou, Brittany, Vermandois, Toulouse, Burgundy, Gascony, Aquitaine, and Languedoc. Many of the king's vassals ruled over territories far greater than his own, and paid him little more than lip-service. This was hardly indicative of a dynasty that would rule one of Europe’s most powerful countries for the next 800 years. Yet by a happy accident Hugh Capet's descendants, the Capetian Dynasty (987-1328), would succeed to the French throne without conflict until 1328; a total of fifteen Capetian kings in a direct line. This longevity was seminal to the foundation of the nation-state of France, for these kings would slowly but steadily increased their power and influence, until it grew to encompass the entirety of the realm by the reigns of Philip II and Louis IX in the 13th-century. Vikings in Russia Although there was no doubt plenty of sporadic raiding, trade rather than plunder was the main reason that the Vikings penetrated deep into Russia during the 9th-century. Like their cousins in the Humber and the Seine, predominantly Swedish Vikings used the much longer and deeper Russian rivers to penetrate the country. Flowing north and south, the Dvina, Dnieper and Volga rivers made it surprisingly easy for ships and goods to travel between the Baltic and the Black Sea or Caspian Sea. We hear of contacts with the Byzantine Empire in 838, and they attempted to besiege Constantinople itself in 860; Abbasid Islamic sources mention them by 846. In the East, the Vikings were known as the Rus, according to the prevailing theory from the Old Norse term for "rower"; they would ultimately give their name to Russia. Russian traditional history begins with their establishment of a trading-post at Novgorod, well positioned on Lake Ilmen at the headwaters of the Dvina, Dnieper and Volga rivers which respectively flow into the Baltic, Black Sea and Caspian Sea. Here, according to the earliest sources, a Viking chieftain called Rurik and his brothers established a heavily-defended settlement prior to 860, and subdued all local East Slavic tribes to their rule. By 882, Rurik's successor Oleg moved his headquarters down the Dnieper, seizing the town of Kiev from the Khazar Khaganate, a huge but loose state of semi-nomadic Turkish people to the north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. It's position allowed it to control the trade route between Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire, and thus a state gradually emerged. Kievan Rus '(882–1240) consisted of a coordinated group of federated princely states with a common interest in maintaining trade along the rivers; these included Kiev, Novgorod, Rostov, Vladimir, Suzdal, Chernigov, Halych, Minsk, and Smolensk, among others. The Rus brought with them no women, and intermarried and merged with the local Eastern Slav population. Although primarily populated by Slavs, there is justice in the Rus giving Russia her name. Their development of commercial techniques, great skills in navigating the waterways, and formidable fighting power laid the foundation of the Russian nation. In 907, Oleg of Kiev attacked Constantinople again, catching the Byzantines unaware with their fleet scattered widely. He is said to have carried his ships overland into the imperial harbour, and blocked the entrance until he extracted a favourable treaty; an even more comprehensive and detailed treaty was concluded in 911. By the reign of Grand Prince Vladimir the Great (980-1015), the settled and prosperous Rus had begun to seem something new and different from Vikings or Slavs; Russians. Vladimir took the step that would give Russia its characteristic identity. It seems probable that he had been exposed to Christianity in his youth through his grandmother's private conversion; the treaties with Byzantium allowed missionaries to travel throughout the Rus lands. Vladimir at first showed the ostentatious paganism that was expected of a Viking warlord, but then he began to enquire of other religions. Legend says that he had their different merits debated before him. Legend says that he had the merits of different religions debated before him. Russians treasure the story that Islam was rejected by him because it forbade alcoholic drink. Vladimir's emissaries travelled to Germany, but saw no beauty in their churches. But Constantinople won their hearts. Of Hagia Sophia, they said in words often to be quoted, "''we knew not whether we were in heaven or earth, for on earth there is no such vision nor beauty, and we do not know how to describe it; we know only that there God dwells among men." Around about 988, Vladimir accepted Eastern Orthodox Christianity for himself and his people. The new religion was rapidly and often forcibly imposed on the Russian population, beginning with the mass baptism of the people of Kiev. There were diplomatic dimensions to the choice too. In an unprecedented acknowledgement of the standing of a prince of Kiev, Vladimir married the sister of Emperor Basil II; his sister Anna may be forgiven for her obvious reluctant, since her new husband already had four wives and 800 concubines according to the chronicles. In exchange, Vladimir was to aid Basil in his wars against the Bulgars, and to send 6,000 Viking soldiers into the service of the Byzantines; many of them were to stay as the first of the famous Varangian Guard, an elite unit that would exist until the 14th century. But Vladimir’s choice of Eastern Orthodoxy was decisive of much more than diplomacy; it was the single decision which more than any other determined Russia’s future. Two hundred years later his countrymen acknowledged this and Vladimir canonised a saint. 11th-century Kievan Rus had in many ways a richer culture than most of Western Europe could offer. Its towns were important trading centres where goods of all kinds were exchanged. Scandinavia and Russia exported amber, honey, wax, fur, walrus ivory, and especially Slavic slaves; the word "slave" derives from Slav. White slaves were particularly desirable in the Abbasid Caliphate after a major uprising by black slave from 869 until 883. On their return trip they would carry silk, spices, wine, fruit, and other luxuries available in the Byzantine and Muslim world. Kiev became famous for the magnificence of its churches; unhappily, being of wood, none of them have survived. The Byzantines introduced them to rudimentary Greek philosophy, science, and historiography. Kiev was at its height under Vladimir's son, Yaroslav the Wise (1019-54). He followed Justinian's example in commissioning a codification of Russia's laws, the Russkaya Pravda. ''His reign also saw one of the first great Russian works of literature, ''The Primary Chronicle, an interpretation of Russian history in Christian terms. On the international stage, Yaroslav played the medieval game of matrimonial diplomacy as astutely as any of his contemporaries. Having himself married a Swedish princess, he found husbands for the womenfolk of his family in kings of Poland, France and Norway. A harried Anglo-Saxon royal family took refuge at his court. Russia was then culturally more open to the outside world, than it would be for centuries. But his successors in Kiev were unable to provide lasting political stability within the vast sprawling realm. A little more than a century after Yaroslav's death, Kiev's dominance waned to the benefit of several independent regional principalities. Germany of Otto the Great Political fragmentation was to characterise Germany's history for a thousand years, but in the 10th and 11th centuries it looked otherwise for a while. The internal challenges of Germany were even deeper than those of France: it had mostly never been Roman, was heavily forested and had few roads, with the River Rhine the only real north-south route; and the assertiveness of local nobles combined with deep rooted tribal loyalties. This produced a half-dozen powerful dukedoms, the four whose distinctions mattered most being the Franks of Franconia and Lorraine, the Alemanni of Swabia, the recently conquered Saxony, and the Bavarians who are known to have existed since the 6th-century. As in France, internal problems were further aggravated by external threats, which Germany faced from both the west and the east. In the west, there were the marauding Vikings using the Rhine to penetrate far inland. The most significant Viking raid was in the winter of 881-82, when elements of the Great Heathen Army turned their aggression on the Rhineland after their defeat at the Battle of Edington (May 878) by Alfred the Great. Cologne, Bonn, Neuss, Jülich, and Andernach were all plundered or forced to pay tribute. In the Rhineland, the Vikings encountered the old Roman road network and used it to inflict the greatest outrage of all; storming the old imperial capital of Aachen and desecrating the tomb of Charlemagne. The Viking threat began to wane when King Arnulf (896-899) defeated them at the Battle of Leuven (September 891) in modern-day Belgium. But the Viking impact on Germany had been much less dramatically than in France or the British Isles. No doubt the explanation lies in the shared a border with Denmark which allowed for more direct political engagement with Scandinavia; we often hear about Viking raids followed by an apology and recompense from a Danish king. German sources were much more concerned with raids and incursions from the east than with Scandinavia. The region north of the Danube has been Europe's doorway to tribal groups arriving from the central Asian steppes. Here the Huns and Avars first presented themselves to the Roman Empire, requesting or demanding tribute. The Magyars were a pagan Finno-Ugric speaking people who had been living for several centuries in south Russia near the mouth of the Don, as vassals of the Turkic Khazar Khaganate (650-969). From about 830 they migrated west, spending a few years in the Balkans in the service of the Byzantine emperor, before moving-on to establish themselves in the Carpathian Basin (modern-day Hungary). In 895, the chieftains of the seven Magyar tribes elect as their leader Árpád (d. 907). Although his people numbered no more than 25,000, under Árpád they subdued the scattered Slavic population of the region within the space of a few years. Árpád is commonly regarded as one of the founders of the Hungarian nation, which somehow, in all the upheavals of central Europe and surrounded by Slav neighbours, would retain its identity and language down through the centuries. For several decades, the pagan Hungarians were a profoundly disruptive force in the region, constantly raiding west into Germany and south into Italy as well as Burgundy and France. Magyar armies consisted mostly of mounted-archers and were highly mobile. Attacking without warning, they would plundered the countryside and departed before any defence could be mustered. If forced to fight, they would harass their enemies with arrows, then invariably feign retreat, tempting them to break ranks and pursue, thus luring them into a vulnerable position. When the Carolingian king Louis the Child (900-911) died without leaving a male heir, the only legitimate claimant descended from Charlemagne was King Charles III of France. The great German dukes wanted a strong leader against the Magyars, so instead elected one of their own to the vacant throne, Conrad of Franconia (911-18). Perhaps this is the moment at which there emerges a German state distinct from the Frankish Empire. Conrad's reign was a generally unsuccessful, failing to stop the Magyar raids and losing Lorraine to the French sphere of influence, all leading to further decline in royal authority against the growing power of the local dukes. On his deathbed, he yielded the crown to his main rival, Henry the Fowler of Saxony (r. 919–36). Henry did much to prevent a collapse of royal power, as had happened in West Francia. On his side he had great family properties including silver mines, the tribal loyalties of the Saxons, and a formidable fighting force constantly trained by raiding the Slavic peoples to the east. He brought the other magnates into line by proving himself a good soldier. At first, Henry focused on defending only his home duchy of Saxony. By capturing a Magyars war leader, he secured a truce for the region. By 933, he felt strong enough to refuse further payments of tribute to the Hungarians. When they launched a massive punitive expedition, he routed it at the Battle of Riade (933). During his reign, he reacquired Lorraine as a vassal, and incorporated eastern territories held by the Slavic Wends, who together with the Vikings had been attacking the German coast. He also turned Denmark a tribute payers, and began its conversion. This gave Henry sufficient prestige throughout the kingdom that he was able to pass the German throne to his son without conflict. '''Otto the Great (936-973) had a substantial inheritance from his father and made good use of it, He continued his work of maintaining a strong monarchy and disciplining the great dukes, allowing them leeway in their own regions but insisting on two royal prerogatives: dukes were to bring an army to wherever the king was campaigning; and wresting from the dukes the powers of appointing bishops and abbots within their territory. He then deliberately made use of these bishoprics accountable directly to him to strengthen his rule in every part of the realm, granting them lands and privileges; he effectively established a national church 600 years before Henry VIII. The weaknesses behind this solution would be concealed behind the personal ascendancy of Otto and his commanding successors up to the mid-11th-century. He faced a string of revolts early in his reign from dukes wary of this growing central power, but was able to bring them to heel by 938. He also expanded his authority over Burgundy and Bohemia (modern-day Czechia and Solvakia). Meanwhile Otto, like Charlemagne before him, was drawn into Italy. Since the nominal Carolingian line petered-out in 924, Frankish northern Italy had fallen into instability with several local aristocratic families contesting the kingship. In 950, unexpected deaths resulted in the Italian crown falling to Queen Adelaide. Fearing the ambitions in Italy of dukes of Swabia and Bavaria, Otto marched into Italy in 951, took the capital of Pavia claiming the crown King of the Lombards, and married Adelaide himself, his first wife having died. Yet the Pope refused him an imperial coronation, and Otto soon had to depart. When his new marriage produced a son in 952, Otto's eldest son by his first marriage, Liudolf (d. 957), rose in revolt, with the aid of several magnates reluctant to accept an heir by a foreign wife. But the position of the rebels began to deteriorate when the Magyars invaded Germany in 954. Otto accused them of complicity with foreign enemies, and Liudolf had to submit by the end of the year. Encouraged by their successful raids, the Magyar invaded Germany again in the spring of 955, and escalated their usual plundering by besieging the city of Augsburg. Otto assembled his army and marched south, where his heavy cavalry decisively defeated the lightly armed and armored Hungarians at the Battle of Lechfeld (955). The defeat was so heavy that the Hungarians completely ceased all raids westwards, gradually abandoning their horse-warrior culture and settling down in the Carpathian Basin. By 975 they had begun the process of integration into Western Christendom, and by the end of the long reign of Stephen I Árpád (997-1038), Hungary was a strong feudal and Christian state. As for Otto, victory at Lechfeld made his hold over his kingdom unassailable, but his ambition did not stop there. In 962, Otto was back in Italy this time responding to an appeal from Pope John XII (955-964) against a troublesome Italian noble. This time the Pope crowned him Holy Roman Emperor like Charlemagne; a title that had fallen into abeyance since 924. it was the beginning of an unbroken association between the imperial title and Germany lasting for more than eight centuries. With a realm that now covered much of central Europe, Otto and his immediate successors were the leading rulers in Europe. All areas under the Ottonian emperors enjoyed peace, security, and prosperity, and the resultant flowering of culture has been called the Ottonian Renaissance (936-1002); an analogue to the Carolingian Renaissance which accompanied Charlemagne's coronation in 800. It was centred in the imperial court and a small group of monasteries that received direct sponsorship from the Emperor, most famously the island monastery of Reichenau on Lake Constance. These produced a revived cathedral schools, and some exquisite illuminated manuscripts and metalwork, the premier art forms of the time. The architecture of the period was also innovative, such as St. Michael's Church in Hildesheim. The Ottonian Empire was a remarkable achievement. Otto’s son, Otto II (973-983), married a Byzantine princess. Otto III (996-1002) was able to inherit the crown as an infant, and were on to make a cousin Pope; the first German pope, Gregory V (996-999). He left no heir, but the direct Saxon line was not exhausted; Henry II (1014-24) was a great-grandson of Henry the Fowler. All had reigns troubled by revolt, but successfully maintained the tradition established by Otto the Great of exercising power over more than half of Charlemagne's old realm. But the structure of the empire was not very solid. It rested on a feudal hierarchy of hereditary nobles and the political manipulation of the greatest of them rather than on administration. Then there remained the paradox of an elected feudal overlord. An emperor could not nominate his son as heir without the approval of the German magnates. They tended to accept the rule of a strong king, but to reassert their independence during weaker reigns. Finally, for all their strength, the Holy Roman Emperors did not dominate the Church as Charlemagne had done. Otto himself deposed two popes and installed replacements more to his liking, but he was the Church's protector who thought he knew what was best for it, rather than its governor; a protector the papacy in Rome had less and less need of now that the Magyars had been pacified. The unraveling of the Holy Roman Empire began with the Investiture Controversy, the first of the clashes between Church and state that would be a dominant theme of medieval Europe. Another enduring national entity which began to crystallise at about this time was Poland. Its origins lay in a group of northern Slavic tribes struggling against slave-traders, as well as the pressure from Germans slowly and steadily pushing eastwards into the less developed and heavily forested lands. German expansion, which would be an ongoing process into the 13th-century, comprised a huge folk-movement, a tide of men and women clearing forest, planting homesteads and villages, building fortresses to protect them, founding monasteries and churches to serve them, and then by the granting of feudal rights and bishoprics in newly occupied territories. As a reaction to these dangers, by the 9th-century Eastern Europe was dotted with larger well-fortified settlement. it was from one of these settlements, today the town of Gniezno, that Poland bursts onto the historical record history with unparalleled suddenness under Mieszko I (960-992). Threatened by the fate of Bohemia, forced conversion and incorporation into the Holy Roman Empire, Mieszko moved with extraordinary speed. In 965, he married a Roman Christian princess of Bohemia, and the next year accepted the faith for himself and his people. To secure Poland's position even further, he subsequently placed his lands under the special protection of the papacy in Rome. Mieszko also gains territory for Poland, extending his realm north to the Baltic coast through alliances and conquest, and using the structures of feudal Europe to secure his territory. He bequeaths a powerful kingdom to his descendants, who would go on to rule Poland for four centuries. A vigorous successor began the creation of an administrative system and extended his lands to Silesia in the south and Kraków in the west. There were grim times to come, but Poland was henceforth a historical reality. Vikings Elsewhere The travels of the Vikings took them far and wide. They set up a permanent base at the mouth of the River Loire from which they could strike as far south as the Iberian Peninsula. Probably the most significant raid was in 844, when the Vikings successfully plundered Muslim Lisbon and Cadiz. From 859-862 a sustained Viking 'tour' was undertaken probably by Björn Ironside, another son of the legendary Viking chieftain Ragnar Lodbrok. Sailing from the mouth of the Loire, they plundered their why down the French and Iberian coasts. Crossing through Gibraltar, they then raided Morocco, the southern coast of Spain, and the Balearic Islands. The Vikings then spent the winter on the mouth of the Rhone, near Marseilles. In the next year, they raided throughout southern France. Turning east, they sacked Pisa and Luna in Italy, according to legend mistaking the latter for Rome. They then returned to the mouth of the River Loire over the next years via the same route, though an Arab fleet battered them on the way back. But it was the Viking colonisation of remote islands that was arguably their most spectacular achievement. Iceland was discovered by a Viking called Naddodd around 825, who was sailing from Norway to the Scottish Faroe Islands but got lost; archaeological evidence suggest Irish hermits may have settled in Iceland beforehand, but left before the Vikings arrived. In 874, Viking settlers together with their families, retainers, and livestock beached their longships on the island near where Reykjavik now stands and established a settlement. Others similar groups soon followed and some fifty years later there were perhaps 10,000 Norse Icelanders, living by sheep farming and fishing, in part for their own subsistence and in part to produce commodities they might trade such as salted fish. As more and more immigrants arrived, rivalry were inevitable, and it becomes necessary to establish some form of central authority. In 930, a council of all the chieftains of the community met for the first time, following an earlier Scandinavian tradition called the Thing. While some historians would dispute Iceland's claim to be the world's oldest parliamentary democracy, her continuous historical record from this date is still a remarkable one. Two centuries later the population of Iceland was already about 75,000, a level not exceeded until the 20th century. From high ground in western Iceland the peaks of Greenland can sometimes be glimpsed across 175 miles of sea. According to the Norse Sagas, Erik the Red (d.1003) was a man so difficult and violent that he was exiled from both Norway an Iceland, and in about 986 sailed west with his family, landing near what is now Julianehaab. At the end of his exile Eric returns to Iceland to persuade more settlers to join him. With a better sense of public relations than of accuracy, he gave his territory the attractive name of Greenland. About 350 people returned with him and there were eventually three separate colonies along roughly 400 mile of the eastern coast. There were to be Norsemen in this inhospitable environment until the climate turned for the worse with the Little Ice Age from the early 15h-century; Greenland was abandoned to the native Inuit peoples once again. Furthermore, historians no longer dispute the unmistakable archeological evidence that Vikings from Greenland reached North America. The Sagas give various versions of how Leif Erikson, a son of Erik the Red, came to spend a winter at a place west of Greenland which he names Vinland; he was either himself blown off course, or following up reports of another Viking called Bjarni Herjólfsson blown off course fifteen years earlier. Either way around the year 1000 Leif landed in the Americas on the northern peninsula of present-day Newfoundland, over five-hundred years before Christopher Columbus. He returned to Greenland, and a few years later Icelandic colonists established a settlement in Vinland; the root Vin in old Norse could imply either that grape vines or flat grassland characterised the region. The settlers survived only three winters, before being discouraged by the hostility of the native Americans. Decline of the Vikings Gradually the story of the Vikings became the story of the struggle to establish stable kingdoms in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and the Christianisation of Scandinavia; feasting in Valhalla and the end-of-days vision of Ragnarök were superseded by heavenly harps and the Last Judgement. Unlike the rest of Scandinavia, Denmark has a lot of good farmland and can sustain a denser population; already by the 5th-century it had four or five fairly prosperous kingdoms. Frankish sources considered Denmark more or less unified under the reign of Gudfred (804-810), mentioned in a treaty with Charlemagne, but another century passed before a stable dynasty was established. Returning Vikings brought a lot of wealth back, but they also brought political instability. It was under Gorm the Old (936-958) that all of Denmark was first solidly ruled by a single king, from whom the current Danish monarchy can trace its roots. Recorded missionary efforts in Denmark started in the 8th-century, and Danes encountered Christianity when they participated in Viking raids from the 9th century. It was under Gorm's son Harald Bluetooth (958-986) that Denmark was officially Christianised in 965, when he was baptised a Christian and in the way of royal converts, saw this personal event as the conversion of all the Danes. This achievement is commemorated in Denmark's famous Jelling Stones. Harald was a contemporary of Otto the Great, and no doubt his reasons were largely political, prompted by the fear of an invasion. Even after becoming Christian, Danes long blended it together with their pagan belief system, and the Church did not become a basis of royal power; Harald stablised his kingdom through force, building a network of fortresses throughout his realm. Denmark was sufficiently stable for his son Sweyn Forkbeard (986-1014) and grandson Cnut the Great (1016-35) to extend the Danish kingdom to England in 1013, and for a while to Norway as well. Norway had only a few years previously become a single Christian kingdom. According to the Norse Sagas, the first attempt to unify the whole are associated with the semi-mythical Harald Fairhair (872–930), apparently inspired by a woman who spurned a man whose kingdom wasn’t even as large as tiny Denmark. After uniting all the Viking settlements of the southern Norwegian coastal by force, he is said to have ruled with a strong hand, prompting many Norwegians to leave the country for Iceland, the Scottish islands, Greenland, and parts of Britain and Ireland. Fairhair's 10 wives gave him a great many sons who created chaos at his death over the succession. Eric Bloodaxe (929–934) gradually eliminated most of his brothers to become king, only to be later usurped by another brother, and end up as the last Viking ruler of York in England until 954. The usurper Haakon the Good (934–961) had been baptised a Christian during his upbringing in England, and attempted to spread Christianity in Norway. When he was defeated and killed, Norwegian Christianity all but disappeared again. Christianity was finally cemented during the reign of Olaf II Haraldsson (1015–1028), the first effective king of all Norway and the country’s patron saint. Olaf was eventually brought down by Danish intervantion, but his son Magnus Olafsson (1035-47) was eventually restored to power, and his half-brother Harald Hardrada (1046-66) established a stable dynasty, though regional automony remained strong. Sweden achieved similar unity rather later and much of its early history is obscure. The first known attempt to Christianise the Swedes were made by St. Ansgar in 830, who was able to secure permission to build a church in Birka. Her first Christian king was Olof Skötkonung (995-1020) who is said to have been baptised in 1008, and ruled over the kernel of the Swedish state. Two centuries later Sweden was still consolidating and disintegrating over dynastic squabbles. Not until the dynasty established by the statesman Birger Jarl (d. 1266) did the Swedish kingdom have the stature to match Denmark or Norway; he is traditionally credited with founding Stockholm around 1250. In Iceland the entire population converted to Christianity at the same moment. Missionaries effects in the 10th century had succeeded bringing some chieftains into the Christian fold. Violent clashes were avoided by the Althing of 1000, where all agreed the incumbent law speaker should decide on the issue of religion. After a day and a night of silently pondering on the matter, he decreed that everyone in Iceland should be baptised, although pagans were allowed to practise their religion in private. Although the Scandinavians became nominally Christian, it took considerably longer for actual Christian beliefs to establish themselves, and the clergy were still condemning paganism well into the 14th-century. After the Viking Age, Scandinavia tends not to be a major actor in European politics. The story of the next 600 years is of dynasties in Denmark, Norway and Sweden struggling to establish stable kingdoms, with sometimes the added ambition of bringing the other two into a unified realm. At various times different regions became dominant within this Scandinavian triangle. Finland basically became a Swedish possession in 1155, and was a frequent venue for Sweden's territorial squabbles with Russia. After the 14th-century, Norway became a junior partner, first to Sweden, then to Denmark, and then to Sweden again. The rulers of Denmark and Sweden incessantly engage in two closely related methods of affecting the balance of power; they went to war against each other, and they married one another's daughters. One such marriage led at last to the personal union of all three crowns under Queen Margaret of Denmark (1389-1412). The so-called Kalmar Union (1397-1523) was only a reality until 1439, but remained an aspiration, occasionally briefly realised, for over a century. In the 16th-century, Iceland fell under Danish dominance, with Danish merchants establishing a trade monopoly on Iceland’s resources that lasted nearly 200 years. One of the few times Scandinavia impacted European history was during the Golden Age of Sweden in the 17th-century, when the armies of Gustavus Adolphus terrorised Central Europe during the Thirty Years War. Byzantine Revival For the Byzantine Empire, the centuries before the mid-8th-century had been effectively one long crisis; from the devastating Roman-Persian War of the early-7th-century, to the vast territorial losses to the Muslim conquests, from the slow overrunning of the Balkans by the Bulgars and Slavs, to the internal turmoil of the Iconoclasm Controversy. The problems looked insurmountable, but like Scipio Africanus after Cannae (216 BC), Aurelian during the crisis of the 3rd-century, and Theodosius after Adrianople (378), a dynasty would emerged to drag the Eastern Roman Empire into one last Golden Age (842-1025). '' [[Age of Charlemagne#Byzantines and the Iconoclasm Controversy|'Michael III']] (842-867) was the last of a succession of weak Byzantine emperors barely able to resist the decay; he was known by his detractors as Michael the Drunkard for his love of wine and song. His reign nevertheless did see hints at recovery, largely credited to those family members who ruled in his name. When his mother Theodora (d. 867) was regent, she saw to it that the veneration of icons was restored without rancor, making sure that his Iconoclast predecessor was not condemned by the Church and spreading the rumour he had repented his folly on his deathbed. The latter half of Michael's reign was dominated by his maternal-uncle Bardas (d. 866). In 858, he appointed the capable statesman Photios (d. 893) as archbishop of Constantinople, who more than any other single person exemplified the cultural rebirth and missionary zeal of this new age. Photios sponsored the missions of Saint Cyril and his brother Methodius to the Slavs, Bulgars, and the Rus; Eastern Orthodox missionaries cannot neatly be distinguished from Byzantine diplomacy, pulling dangerous enemies into the Byzantine sphere of influence. These missions would all bear fruit in time, with the Bulgar Khan Boris I (d. 889) accepting baptism during Michael's reign in 864. Furthermore, realising that all these peoples lacked an alphabet, Cyril set to work devising one; the writing system, name Cyrillic after him, became the basis of alphabets used throughout Eastern Europe and Russia. The same enterprising spirit was manifest in the military successes won on the eastern frontier against the Muslims, with two seasons of campaigning that saw both the Emir of eastern Anatolia and the Emir of Armenia defeated and killed. This marked the beginning of a century of Byzantines military ascendancy. Michael III did make one fateful decision himself, befriending an uncouth Armenian peasant called Basil; it would lead to his own ruin. Basil’s life was a classic rags-to-riches story. His family had probably been forcibly relocated from Armenia, as part of a common Byzantine policy of repopulating frontier regions. He would nevertheless become known as Basil the Macedonian, though the reason is unclear; he was either born in the military theme near Adrianople called Macedonia, or spent some time as a prisoner of the Bulgars in Macedon. Totally illiterate and dirt-poor, Basil sought his fortune in Constantinople, where his skill with horses got him a job in the imperial stables. Somehow he caught the eye of Emperor Michael who gave him a prominent position at court, where he had immediate plans for his new confidant. His uncle had forced him to give-up his mistress Eudokia, and he was looking for a way to respectably keep her close at hand in the palace; Basil was forced to divorce his wife, and marry Eudokia, while the Emperor kept her for himself. From this ignoble beginning, the unscrupulous Basil murdered his way to the imperial throne. By far the biggest name to be targeted was Bardas, the real power behind the throne. He leaned hard on the emperor's naivety to persuade him that his uncle coveted the throne, and subsequently personally murdered Bardas in 865 with Michael's approval. For the next two years, Basil became the real power behind the throne, even stepping into the vacant role as heir. When Michael began to favour another courtier, Basil decided to get rid of him once and for all, brutally murdering the emperor in his bedchamber. The murder of the unpopular emperor was greeted with remarkably little outrage, and the next day he was crowned '''Basil the Macedonian' (867-886). Achieving the throne through a calculated series of murders would have been contemptible, if he and his line had not been some of the ablest emperors in Byzantine history. Basil made it clear from the outset that he had no intention of being a mere figurehead. In the east, he continued the progress against the Muslims made during Michael's reign, sacking the city of Tephrike in eastern Anatolia in 872. In doing so he turned the tide; the empire was now the one on the offensive, the armies of the Prophet retreating. Of course, part of the explanation was the relative decline in Abassid power. In west, he carefully rebuilt relations with the papacy in Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor. With their active support, he stemmed the Muslim tide into Byzantine southern Italy, giving himself an excellent bridgehead from which virtually all of southern Italy was conquered by the end of the century; it would remain in Byzantine hands for the next 200 years. One notable failure was the defence of Sicily, whose last major imperial stronghold of Syracuse fell in 878. Furthermore, Basil patiently strengthened and modernised the Byzantine navy that once again became a strong presence in the eastern Mediterranean, clearing the sea of pirates, and paving the way for increased trade and an economic boom. There was suddenly a new spirit in the air, an energy and daring not seen since the days of Justinian the Great. Like Justinian, Basil introduced a flurry of legal activity, updating the Code of Justinian and producing two smaller legal manuals that made it more accessible to judges and lawyers. Again imitating Justinian, he poured the newly prosperous treasury into a massive building program; buildings, monuments and walls across the capital were given a much-needed revamp after decades of neglect. He also stamped his own mark on the city, personally overseeing the construction of the Nea Ekklesia cathedral (New Church); Basil's Hagia Sophia. Topped by five cascading gilded domes and its inside covered in marble and mosaics, by all contemporary accounts it was a truly remarkable building. Unfortunately for modern tourists, the church was accidentally blown-up by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, who were using it as a gunpowder store. In almost every respect, Basil had had a spectacular reign, bringing prestige back to the empire by miitary victories, and spurring a renaissance of Byzantine art, architecture, and learning, that would see the Empire achieve one last great flowering over the next century-and-a-half. But perhaps it was fitting that his reign ended as it had begun; in treachery and murder. Basil's spirits declined late in his reign, when his eldest son died. He had always disliked his younger son, suspecting Leo of being the son of Michael and Eudokia. Relations between the two deteriorated very badly, and Basil died in somewhat mysterious circumstanced in 886. The tale was a tall one involving the 74-year old emperor hunting alone, being dragged an improbable distance through the woods by a stag, and then found by a group led by the father of Leo's mistress. Despite occasional setbacks, the military, political, cultural and economic situation continued to improve under Basil's successors. The dynastic succession was far from untroubled, with three of the first seven emperors powerful generals who married into the family and pushed aside a legitimate ruler. But this periodic infusion of new blood proved to the long-term benefit of the empire. The first of these generals, Romanos I Lekapenos (920-44), reconquered most of eastern Anatolia as far as Edessa, lands that had fallen three centuries before during the first wave of the Muslim conquests. In paved the way in the next generation for two of the finest generals Byzantium ever produced, both of whom would rule in turn, Nikephoros II Phokas (963-969) and his nephew John I Tzimiskes (969-976). In 961, Crete was finally restored to imperial control, which the Muslims had effectively been using as a pirate base to terrorise the Aegean for 150 years; thereby Byzantine naval supremacy was restored in the eastern Mediterranean. But this was only the beginning. In 962, Phokas swept all before him along the eastern frontier, culminating in the capture of Aleppo in Syria. Cyprus was permanently retaken in 965. Then in 969 cam the most spectacular victory of all, the recovery of the great city of Antioch, seat of one of the five great archbishoprics of Christendom. In 975, the empire's armies even threatened Jerusalem, far to the south. In the west, encroachment by the Kievan Rus' south of the Danube was driven-off in 971. The very zenith of Byzantine power came under the long-reign of Emperor Basil II (976-1025), the great-grandson of Basil I (d. 886). Ascending to the throne at just eighteen, the first decade of his long reign were plagued by attempts to usurp him: two came from powerful generals, for the last two emperors had brushed aside the legitimate heir and been superb rulers; and a third came from a scheming court eunuch, who had been effectively running the empire while John Tzimiskes focused on military campaigns. With boundless energy and an iron will, Basil outmaneuvered and outlasted them all. By 985, the emperor was at last free to rule on his own, and magnificently. Basil's most famous and longest military expedition was against the Bulgars, who had long been a thorn in Constantinople's side, constantly raiding imperial territory and then retreating into the wilds of the Balkans; the Byzantine Conquest of Bulgaria (986-1018). His first campaign in 986 turned out a humiliating disaster, walking into an ambush set-up by the wily Samuel of Bulgaria (976-1014) in a narrow Bulgarian mountain pass known as Trajan’s Gate. This promped yet another attempted coup, that Basil only survived with the help of Vladimir of Kiev; the emperor promised his sister hand in marriage, in exchange for 6,000 Viking mercenaries and Vladimir's conversion to Orthodox Christianity. The Scandinavians so impressed Basil that he organised them into what would become the famous Varangian Guard; they would faithfully serve the empire for the next 300 years, as an elite unit of the army and the emperor's personal bodyguard. Perhaps their most famous member was Harald Hardrada (d. 1066), who after becoming rich in Byzantine service, returned home, became king of Norway, and invaded England in 1066. When Basil launched his second invasion of Bulgaria in 1000, he had sat of the throne for 24 years, but had remarkably little to show for it. This was a brilliant campaign, a patient and methodical advance, slow, relentless and irresistible. Even a failed Muslim attempt to invade Syria and retake Antioch only brought a pause in hostilities. As the Byzantines took more and more of his territory and facing internal descent, Samuel staked it all in one last battle in a narrow ravine in the Belasica Mountains. At the Battle of Kleidion (July 1014), Basil outmaneuvered the Bulgarians, finding a small path around the fortified pass, and attacking from both sides. It was a rout from the outset; Samuel himself escaped in the chaos but virtually no one else did. It was here that Basil earned his moniker "Basil the Bulgar Slayer" by which he is known to history. Wanting to break the remaining resistance, he blinded over 14,000 captives, sending them back to their leader in groups of 100, each led by a one-eyed guide. Samuel was said to have died of shock. His kingdom survived him for four year, but after Kleidion the outcome was never it doubt. The Bulgarians formally submitted in 1018, and under a relatively light Byzantine yoke, would remain a Byzantine province for almost 200 years. Basil II continued campaigning until his death in 1025, with further success in the east, turning Georgian Iberia to the north of Armenia into a client kingdom. In the single-minded of service to the empire, he had expanded its territory more than any emperor since Heraclius, restoring the Danube as a more stable and secure western border. He had also created an army to be feared by the empire's enemies. Throughout the whole Macedonian Dynasty, the arts had flourished and the University of Constantinople became once again one of the leading sources of learning for its day. Had anyone even half as capable succeeded him, the empire's prosperity would have been assured. Yet his successors squandered their inheritance, allowing internal factionalism to get out of hand, neglecting the army and navy, and engineering in only 46 years such a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Manzikert (1071) that the empire never recovered. Perhaps the historian John Julius Norwich (d. 2018) said it best, "Basil II died on 15th December. By the 16th, the decline had already begun". Rise of Regional Muslim Powers Many of the greatest names of the Islamic Golden Age were writing when the political framework of the Muslim world was already in decay. Provincial distinctions remained very real, and the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad gradually lost control of their sprawling, ethnically diverse empire, beginning on the peripheries. Muslim Spain was lost at the very start of the Abbasids, when an Umayyad prince who escaped the fate of his house proclaimed himself emir of Umayyad Spain (756–1031); it was effectively independent long before its ruler formally declared himself a rival Caliph in 929. But everywhere governorships tended to become hereditary, and exercised more and more autonomy in appointments and the handling of taxation. Morocco was lost to the Idrisid Dynasty (788–974), and Tunisia to the Aghlabids (800–909). The growing weak of the Abbasid Caliphs tempted them into short-sighted policies that only hastened the decline, particularly the establishment of a foreign army known as Mamluks. In origin it was composed of slave-soldiers, mostly enslaved Turkic steppe nomads, Georgians, and Egyptian Christians. Outstanding fighters and well-placed to advance their own interests, they frequently took the opportunity. One of the first Mamluks to seize power was the Turkic officer Ahmad ibn Tulun (d. 884) who established himself as an independent emir in Egypt in 868, and quickly extended his control over the eastern Mediterranean coast through Palestine and up into Syria. Another important breakaway came when the Abbasids lost control of Iran to the Buyid Dynasty (934–1062), the first major Caliphate of the Shi'a branch of Islam, rather than orthodox Sunni Islam; a schism that dated back to the immediate successors of Muhammad. In 946, a Buyid general captured Baghdad, deposed the Caliph and installed a new one. Theoretically, the line of Abbasids continued but their effective rule was confined to an area around Baghdad. The unity of the Muslim world then definitively came to an end with the establishment of the Fatimid Dynasty (909–1171) in Egypt in 973. Originating in Tunisia, they were also Shi'a. After seizing Egypt, the Fatimid set up their own rival Caliphate over a broad swathe of the Mediterranean coast from Carthage to Syria, and moved their capital to a new city on the Nile, founded on a Muslim garrison town; it was called Al Kahira (the victorious), though more commonly known today by its western form, Cairo. They would be the chief political and ideological antagonist to the Abbasids for even nominal authority over the Islamic world. Less conspicuous examples could be found elsewhere in the Abbasid dominions as local governors began to term themselves Sultan or Emir, nominally subordinate to the Caliphate. The fragmented Islamic world would be unable to resist the centuries of invasion which followed, although it was not until 1258 that the last Abbasid was slaughtered by the Mongols. Before that came the rise of the Seljuk Turks, and then the Crusades, which prompted a brief revival of Islamic unity under Saladin. But the great days of Islamic empire were over. We should not rush to label this fragmentation a failure; holding together an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the border with China for 300 years was already a logistical and organisational triumph. Culturally the Islamic Golden Age continued almost without interuption, at least until the sack of Baghdad in 1258. The various Islamic states were more compact and practical to govern. Perhaps the outstanding example was Islamic Spain, which was the most prosperous and spectacular realm in 10th-century Europe. Cordoba grew fast as a capital and by 1000 was beginning to challenge Constantinople for the position of largest city on the continent; both had populations of nearly half-a-million people, at a time when Paris and London were still disease-ridden firetraps with barely 25,000. It was not until the 11th and 12th centuries that Spain’s Islamic civilization reached its greatest beauty and creativity, producing some seven hundred magnificent mosques, as well as great learning and philosophy. This did not mean that the Umayyads were untroubled: it was one of the few places the Arabs conquered where they had to reestablish a taxation system. And the Muslims had never conquered the north-west of the peninsula; Charlemagne recovered the north-east by the 10th-century. There were thus Christian kingdoms in the north making several tentative beginnings at Reconquista. ''Nevertheless, a fairly tolerant policy towards Christians prevailed in Muslim Spain, and it was of enormous importance to Western Europe; as was Muslim Sicily after the Norman reconquest in the 11th-century. These were doors to the learning and science of the Islamic world, as well as more practical benefits; through them Christendom received knowledge of agricultural and irrigation techniques. The admiration and repute of Arab writers among Christian scholars was a recognition of its importance. Dante (d. 1321) paid Avicenna and Averroes the compliment of placing them in limbo when he allocated great men to their fate in his poem ''The Divine Comedy. European languages are still marked by Arabic words: "zero", "cipher", "almanac", "magazine", and "alchemy" among them. The technical vocabulary of commerce too, for example "tariff", is a reminder of the superiority of Arab commercial practices; the Arab merchants taught Christians how to keep accounts. It is hard to know whether the European triumphs of medieval Cathedral building, the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and the Scientific Revolution would have been possible without the influence of the Islamic world. Strikingly, this cultural traffic was almost entirely one way. The Arabs regarded the civilization of the cold lands of the north as a meagre, unsophisticated affair. But the Byzantines did impress them. Besides having a great political, material and intellectual impact on Christendom, Islam also spread far beyond the world of Arab hegemony. Religion is society for Muslims, and this unity has outlasted centuries of political division. Arab merchants carried it with them wherever they went. Islam reached Central Asia, the Niger River of north-west Africa, the Swahili city-states of east Africa, and India by the 11th-century. Thanks to the conversion of Mongols in the 13th century, it would also reach China. By the 16th century it spread across the Indian ocean to Malaya and Indonesia. There would even be a last, final extension of the faith into south-east Europe in the 16th due to the Ottomans. It was a remarkable achievement for an idea at whose service there had been in the beginning so few resources. But in spite of its majestic record no state was ever again to provide unity for Islam after the 10th century. Even Arab unity was to remain only a dream, though one cherished still today. Category:Historical Periods